The 10 best U.S. cities for earning potential—the top 3 are all on the West Coast

There's a lot to weigh when it comes to where you want to live: the cost of renting or owning a house, cost of goods and services, amenities like performance and sports venues, proximity to friends and family …

One critical component of where you end up living, of course, is your job, including how much you earn and how far you can stretch those earnings in your given town or city.

Background check company Checkr recently analyzed the 100 largest U.S. cities to find the 10 best cities for earning potential. They used data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of Economic Analysis to create a score based on real per capita personal income, 10-year income growth and percentage of households making more than $200,000.

The results span various regions of the country. Here are the 10 best cities for earning potential, ranked from highest earnings potential to lowest and including the median household income in each city per the Census Bureau. (Because Checkr used its own method to calculate rankings, earning potential is not reflected in median income.)

Median household income: $52,649

In terms of why these cities are the top ranked for earning potential, experts cite a few reasons.

As it pertains to San Jose, San Francisco and Seattle, all three are tech hubs, and tech is an industry with many high-paying jobs. The median pay for a software developer, for example, is $109,020 per year, according to BLS.

Second, "what's always the case is that many of the highest paying cities are also the most expensive cities," says Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter. Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle rank as some of the most expensive places to live in in the U.S., according to Kiplinger.

Finally, most recently, remote work has played a part in cities' earning potential, too.

"Post-pandemic, more companies are embracing flexible working arrangements and more talent is asking for remote opportunities," says Kathryn Minshew, CEO and founder of The Muse founder. "These factors are a driver of certain jobs leaving high cost urban areas and gravitating towards cities that still provide a high quality of life, but where a paycheck goes much further." Austin, Denver and Nashville all fall into this category, according to a recent New York Times analysis.

"In short," she says, "the opportunity for higher paying positions is more widely dispersed than ever."

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